The real pain comes when your email address is no longer valid. You have to hunt down everyone you've ever communicated with to give them a new one. A lot of older, and more casual, contacts will be unable to reach you.
Any geek who relies on a domain name that belongs to someone else for their give-out-to-people, permanent email address needs to have his or her membership card revoked. Even if it's a domain that's owned by Google. Get a domain name.
I was talking about the 99.999% of the human race that doesn't frequent HN. If they buy a domain name with email when Google announces that GMail is sunsetting, it's already too late. Old/casual acquaintances, friends of friends, etc. will only have their gmail.com address.
In a way that might be good. They would get in touch with all of those friends and relatives via 'analog' media like phone, a visit or a get-together :-)
Jokes aside, that would be horrible. I've a domain with GApps but I think my chat is still stuck there. Any ideas how can I break free and still able to chat with my friends(Gmail, Fb and some Yahoo) and have chat transcripts somewhere. Anyone?
I have a really common name - it was taken in all permutations of domains for years. So I jumped on it when the .eu domain names came out, and I've happily used that for a long time now. See what you can find in a more "obscure" TLD.
